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“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”– Isaac Newton

There is something called “Collective Intelligence”

Humans have been around for approximately 200,000 years, but up until about 70,000 years ago, we weren’t too different from any of the other animals in our impact on the environment.

Then, in a relatively short period, we became the dominant predator on Earth. A few 10,000 years later, we began settling into agricultural communities, and less than 9,000 years after that, we learned to write. Since then, our rate of progress has only gotten faster.

The modern world we enjoy today is inconceivably different from the world we’ve lived in for the majority of our existence.

What changed?

The answer lies in our ability to pass down knowledge.

Nothing Is Entirely Original

When most of us think about a discovery or an invention, we think of something new; something that did not exist before; something that seemingly came up to us out of thin air.

That is not an entirely accurate way of looking at it.

No discovery or invention is completely original: Any new idea, process, or method is in some way a combination of old concepts and information. Discoveries are never a product of pure single-handed originality.

There is no copyright on intelligence

Our humanoid prosperity as a species rests on our collective intelligence. Alone, and without the power of past knowledge, we would not be where we are today. Individually, we have to rely on others more than to depend on ourselves.

None of us can do it alone, and we do not have to. The intelligent creative process is nothing else than a way of finding relationships between people, between intelligentsia and what is already known.

Yes indeed, there is something called “Collective Intelligence” and by definition, everything that is “collective” does not carry individual ownership.